Plague Ship

The pulverized limb remained jammed under the door and allowed a curtain of water to surge into the main engine room unchecked. It also held Juan helplessly pinned, because, no matter how he tried, he couldn’t free the prosthesis.

Cabrillo was trapped in the engine room of a doomed ship, and, no matter how he fiddled with his radio dials, he got nothing but static.

CHAPTER 8

MAX HANLEY DIDN’T NEED HALI’S FRANTIC CRY TO tell him a series of explosions had struck the Golden Dawn. He could see the bursts of white water erupting in sequence along the cruise ship’s side on the Oregon’s main monitor. It looked like she’d been struck by torpedoes, but he knew that was impossible. The radar scopes were clear, and sonar would have detected the launches.

As the smoke cleared, Eric zoomed the low-light camera in on one of the damaged areas. The hole was easily big enough for a person to walk through, and seawater was cascading into the breach at a staggering rate. With four identical punctures along her waterline, there were too many compartments flooding to save the ship, especially without power going to her bilge pumps. He estimated that she would founder in less than an hour.

Max tapped his communications console. “George, get your butt back in the whirlybird and get over to the Dawn. A series of scuttling charges just went off, and our people are in trouble.”

“Copy that,” Gomez Adams replied instantly. “Do you want me to land over there?”

“Negative. Hover on standby and await further orders.” Max changed channels. “ Oregon to Cabrillo.

Come in, Juan.” Static filled the Op Center. Hali fine-tuned the transceiver, searching in vain for the Chairman’s signal, but he couldn’t find it. “Julia, are you there? Eddie?”

“I’m here,” a voice suddenly boomed over the loudspeakers. It was Mark Murphy. He was still in the Golden Dawn’s wheelhouse and had better reception. “What just happened? It sounded like explosions.”

“It was,” Max replied. “Someone’s trying to sink the ship, and, from what we can tell over here, they’re going to succeed.”

“I’ve barely started on the downloads.”

“Pack it in, son. Gomez is on his way to you. Hightail it out of there as soon as you can.”

“What about Juan and the others?” Murph asked.

“Have you been able to reach them on the radio?”

“No. Juan cut out about twenty minutes ago when he went down to the engine room.” Hanley suppressed a curse. That was about the worst location to be when the explosives went off.

“What about Eddie and Hux?”

“They fell off the net a couple minutes later. I’ll tell you one thing, Max, the radios in these suits are getting upgraded as soon as we’re back.”

“We’ll worry about that when the time comes,” Max said, although he’d been thinking the exact same thing. He studied the image relayed to the monitor and saw that the Dawn was settling fast. Her lowest row of portholes was less than three feet from going under, and the ship had developed a slight list to starboard. If he sent Murph out to search for the rest of the team, there was a good chance the weapons specialist would become trapped in the vessel. She was sinking pretty evenly now, but he knew the ship could lurch downward at any second. He would just have to trust that the others would make their own way out.

“Mark,” he called, “get aboard the chopper as soon as you’re able. We’ll have you stay on station, searching over the ship for when the rest reach the upper deck.”

“Roger that, but I don’t like it.”

“Neither do I, lad, neither do I.”

AFTER ONLY A QUICK GLANCE at a ship’s schematic, Eddie Seng led Julia unerringly to the Golden Dawn’s small hospital, located on level DD, well below the main deck. With his help, she had gathered blood and tissue samples from a number of victims on the way.

“You’re holding up pretty well for someone who isn’t a medico,” Hux had told Eddie when she was working on the first of the victims.

“I’ve seen how Chinese interrogators leave their prisoners after extracting whatever information they think the person had,” Eddie had said in an emotionless monotone. “After that, nothing much bothers me.”

Julia knew of Seng’s deep-cover forays into China on behalf of the CIA and didn’t doubt he’d seen horrors far worse than anything she could imagine.

As she had suspected, there was a trail of bodies leading down the corridor toward the dispensary, men and women who had had just enough time after falling ill to go to the one place they thought they could find help. She took samples here as well, thinking that something in their physiology gave them a few minutes other victims had been denied by the pathogen. It could be an important clue at finding the cause of the outbreak, since she was holding little hope of finding any survivors.

The hospital door was open when they arrived. She stepped over a man wearing a tuxedo lying across the threshold and entered the windowless antechamber. Her flashlight revealed a pair of desks and some storage cabinets. On the walls were travel posters, a sign reminding everyone that handwashing was a crucial step in reducing infections aboard ship, and a plaque stating that Dr. Howard Passman had received his medical degree from the University of Leeds.

Julia played her light around the adjoining examination room and saw it was empty. A door at the far end of the office led to the patients’ rooms, which were little more than curtained-off cubicles, each containing a bed and a simple nightstand. There were two more victims on the floor here, a young woman in a tight black dress and a middle-aged man wearing a bathrobe. Like all the rest, they were covered in their own blood.

“Think that’s the doctor?” Eddie asked.

“That would be my guess. He was probably struck by the virus in his cabin and rushed here as fast as he could.”

“Not fast enough.”

“For this bug, no one is.” Julia cocked her head. “Do you hear that?”

“In this suit, I can’t hear anything but my own breathing.”

“Sounds like a pump or something.” She pulled back one of the curtains surrounding a bed. The blanket and sheets were crisp and flat.

She went to the next. On the floor next to the bed was a battery-powered oxygen machine like those used by people with respiratory problems. The clear-plastic lines snaked under the covers. Julia flashed her light over the bed. Someone was in it, with the blankets pulled up over their head.

She rushed forward. “We’ve got a live one!”

Huxley peeled back the blankets. A young woman was sound asleep, the air tubes feeding directly into her nostrils. Her dark hair was fanned over the pillow, framing a face with pale, delicate features. She was bone thin, with long arms and slender shoulders. Julia could see the outline of her clavicles through her T-shirt. Even in repose, she’d obviously gone through an ordeal that had taken its toll.

Her eyes fluttered open, and she screamed when she saw the two figures in space suits hovering over her bed.

“It’s okay,” Julia said. “I’m a doctor. We’re here to rescue you.” Julia’s muffled voice did little to calm the woman. Her blue eyes were wide with fear, and she backed up against the head-board, drawing the blankets over herself.

“My name is Julia. This is Eddie. We are going to get you out of here. What’s your name?”

“Who . . . Who are you?” the young woman stammered.

“I’m a doctor from another ship. Do you know what happened?”

“Last night, there was a party.”

When the woman didn’t continue, Julia assumed that she was in shock. She turned to Seng. “Break out another hazmat suit. We can’t take her off the supplemental oxygen until she’s in it.”

“Why’s that?” Eddie asked, tearing open the hazmat suit’s plastic wrap.

“I think it’s why she survived and no one else did. The virus must be airborne. She wasn’t breathing the